One of the recurring themes on the late Scott Adams’ podcast was when he’d talk about how Democrats build entire narratives around what they imagine, rather than on anything that did happen or is likely to happen.
The most classic example of this is when they accuse President Donald Trump of “stealing our democracy,” whatever that even means. Adams would say it means nothing, and that’s the point. The left makes accusations that can’t be proven either wrong or right because they exist only in their Trump-Derangement-Syndrome (TDS)-fevered brains. But, to them, what they imagine is real.
More to the point, Adams would point out that even if the originators of the imagined threats and scenarios don’t believe their own lies, they know they can get their base to buy into certain fears, media-generated hoaxes, and their favorite, imaginary problems. The creators of these narratives treat them as though they are real facts and real threats.
Take this post from an anonymous leftist account on X called @TeaPainUSA Trump is talking about the head of the Office of Management and Budget, obviously alluding to some planned good news from that part of his administration, and this agitator, out of whole cloth, spins it into an imagined threat to the midterm elections. Trump didn’t even hint at that, but that’s the narrative coming from this account.
Trump is literally telling us he's about to attempt to take control of elections. We should believe him.
— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) October 6, 2026
Then there are all the times the left tries to link Trump and other conservatives to Hitler. Leftist influencer Brian Krassenstein never disappoints if you’re looking for someone panicking over things that never happened.
It’s almost as if they’re going out of their way to make it seem like they are Nazis. https://t.co/l0rgPW4yWr
— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) October 5, 2026
By the way, that eagle that Krassenstein is trying to imply was inspired by the Third Reich was in fact drawn from the great Seal of the United States of America, which originated under Democrat President Harry Truman in 1945. Or you might find the artwork for the Department of Defense's Distinguished Service Medal even closer in style. That one was created in 1947. I don’t think Pete Hegseth was secretary of war at the time, but the left wants to imagine this eagle was created by him, even though all the facts say there is no connection.
To reinforce his point about leftists building their cases around hallucinations, Adams would talk about a quote from the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro in February 2021. That’s when Shapiro said, “For Democrats, their top issues are (essentially) hallucinations generated by media disinformation. This is your answer to ‘How powerful is media brainwashing?’ It’s this powerful.”
The bottom line is that when Republicans don’t give the Democrats the political ammunition they want, they just make it up and assign it to whomever they want to target. But instead of accusing Republicans of having done something, they just reframe it to, “This is what the Republicans will do if they get a chance.” Or, "This is what we think they could have done, so they probably did it or are doing it."
One of the more bald-faced lies the left told about Trump centered on something he never said, but they said he did. President Joe Biden, who clearly was already suffering from his serious cognitive decline in this video, is perpetuating an imaginary line that during the pandemic Trump wanted you to inject yourself with bleach – something Trump never said, but the left imagined it and repeated it many, many times.
Biden: “Remember, during the pandemic Donald Trump told us to inject ourselves with bleach” https://t.co/OyYmXbhCvJ
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) March 23, 2024
Perhaps the granddaddy of all hallucinogenic leftist narratives was the “fine people hoax.” Once again, we turn to Biden, who launched his campaign for president with this lie and repeated it every chance he got.
If Biden can go on stage and speak to millions and regurgitate the “very fine people” hoax of which there is clear video evidence of Trump’s full speech exonerating him, what hope is there for the truth? https://t.co/lwFd0v330X
— Ian Miles (@ianmiles) August 20, 2024
While we know leftists lie, all the news media had to do if it actually cared about the truth was to take a few minutes to watch Trump’s comments on the subject in full. Context matters, and the media, universally, opted to allow the left to imprint the “very fine people hoax” on the American psyche.
For the record, here is what Trump actually said August 15, 2017, when asked for comments about a “Unite the Right” rally that was disrupted by neo-Nazis.
7 years ago today, Trump called white supremacists "very fine people" after Charlottesville. Right? Wrong. That was a hoax. Here's what he actually said: https://t.co/BILhEP7WSI
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 15, 2024
By the way, we had to wait roughly nine years for it to come to light that the leftist Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was secretly and allegedly funding some of the people involved in instigating the disruption in Charlottesville, Va., where the “Unite the Right” rally took place.
Last October, Gov. Gavin “Happy Hands” Newsom took his turn at creating an imaginary threat surrounding Trump, baselessly accusing the president of trying to rig elections.
Gavin Newsom: "Look what [Trump's] trying to do to rig the elections… Look what he's doing in terms of the $230M from his DOJ. All the pardoning. All this great grift. The biggest, most corrupt administration in history… I’m deeply concerned about it." https://t.co/hxh9qxYpds
— Thomas Sowell Quotes (@ThomasSowell) October 29, 2025
This version of a leftist perpetuating an imaginary narrative is better known as projection. That’s when leftists accuse you of doing the very things they are already doing. They do this to take the heat off themselves and devalue any accusations you may make of them along the same lines.
One other variation of Democrats and their imaginary problems, as Adams described it, was when Democrats would come up with a new imaginary problem, and then devise a way for them to get credit for solving the problem that never existed in the first place.
Climate change is one example. Another was the left’s framing of the January 6, 2021, riots as an insurrection, even though not one of the people the Democrats put in prison over that event was even charged with actual insurrection.
Adams would say that when it came to these sorts of hoaxes that Democrats used to control their base, it would only work if you left out any and all context. You just had to take the Democrats’ word for it that the earth is warming, or that January 6 was an insurrection. But please don’t demand definitive proof.
Also, in order for it all to work, you need a complicit news media that accepts these imaginary narratives on face value, and then works to parrot the messaging over and over again until the public actually thinks something that was completely made up is the truth.
Of course, all of this adds up to more than what Trump has called "fake news." It's more than the age-old tactics of political lying and smearing. Those things have to be at least somewhat tethered to reality before they can be weaponized dishonestly. What makes the "imaginary problem" dynamic new and serious is that imaginary leftist narratives can't even be bothered to have any relationship at all with the truth. They are divorced from all facts and all reality. The imaginary narrative need only actually exist in the minds of the propagandists who create them.
